In the intervening 20 years between The Devil Wears Prada and its sequel, the fashion and publishing industries have revolutionised. The former has leant more readily into fast fashion and mass consumption, while the latter has been almost entirely decimated – magazines like the fictional ‘Runway’ (a ‘Vogue’ analogue) now exist almost exclusively in an online sphere where no one actually reads the print edition. As a writer and critic, I have heard many times from my older colleagues of the halcyon days of magazine journalism, of the budgets and the editorial freedom. That once where it was possible to “relax”, as Andy (Anne Hathaway) puts it in the new film, nowadays writing for an audience using one’s own mind and body feels like a passing fancy.
Despite reuniting the first film’s cast with its director David Frankel and writer Aline Brosh McKenna, this is not your mother’s The Devil Wears Prada. What is so remarkable and endlessly rewatchable about the original is its slickness – from the opening montage it runs, not walks, the red carpet through its series of stress-inducing vignettes. Number Two is slower, its sound and aesthetic having changed with the characters to reflect a bleaker world – Andy returns to ‘Runway’ after being fired from newspaper ‘The Vanguard’ along with all her colleagues just as she is receiving an award for investigative journalism. It is a mirror crack’d, with strange, uncanny echoes of the first film leaking through. “Am I having a hallucination?” says Emily (Emily Blunt) upon seeing her old co-workers.
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There is a thrill to seeing these characters again, but there is something rather tragic about seeing how jaded they have become. Meryl Streep is on extraordinary form as a more mellowed, beaten-down Miranda Priestley, who despite looking exactly as she did two decades prior, wrestles with change with greater difficulty than anyone else. She has a higher power – HR – to answer to now, and while Priestley still has zingers aplenty, the sadistic sparkle of satan in Schiaparelli (working title for the third movie) has burnt out. It is revived only by the return of Andy, whom she knows is steeled to her old ways, played with pose and less whine by Hathaway, whose beautiful rapport with Stanley Tucci’s delicious fashion director Nigel only continues to blossom here.
While composer Theodore Shapiro brings out leitmotifs in his score from the first film, these are not actors simply treading the same boards for a light-hearted reunion. A rather sinister change has come over Emily, played by Blunt, as she engages in a nauseating relationship with exactly the sort of tech-bro wannabe-starman billionaire who is killing the industries celebrated by the original. The girl who dreamed of Paris continues to be misguided in her desperation for the spotlight, making a nuanced and moving arc. Make no mistake – The Devil Wears Prada 2 scratches every itch a legacy sequel ought, with callbacks and cameos and jokes galore. But if the first film is Tom Ford and Calvin Klein then this time it’s Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen – less slick, and with something darker underneath.